A massive 35MW, 15,000 parking space solar carport has been completed in the Netherlands countryside, where it will be used to power an annual three-day music and camping festival held at Biddinghuizen, a village roughly 70km east of Amsterdam.
Made up of 90,000 solar panels installed across 35 hectares, the solar carport is a joint effort of local PV developer Solarfields and festival organisers MOJO Concerts, the latter of which has been seeking an alternative to the fossil-fuelled generators usually used to provide the bulk of the event’s 300,000kWh of demand each year.
The impressive solar structure, whose output is equivalent to roughly 100 Lowlands festival weekends a year, also uses bifacial panels, which allow the light reflected from the ground to be used to generate energy.
Solarfields says that in addition to a higher energy yield, this allows for the grass under the solar panels to grow better, which in feeds the sheep that graze beneath the panels for the majority of the year when the festival is not running.
The electricity generated outside of festival days is presumably sold to the grid, with an area fund set up to use the proceeds of Solar Carport Biddinghuizen to support preservation of the local environment.
“For our company it is essential that we are committed to a sustainable society and this initiative ensures that more sustainable, green energy is generated. This is an important step within our energy transition towards using renewable energy solely,” said MOJO concerts director Ruben Brouwer.
Solarfields director Niek Tamminga said the realisation of “a colossal project” such as this one was never without its challenges, but the company hoped its “textbook example of multiple land use” would inspire others.
So, is it the world’s largest solar carport? Well, with all of the innovative solar projects happening in all corners of the globe, this is almost impossible to verify. But it would certainly have to be up there.
Compared to Australia, for example, the biggest completed solar carparks One Step Off The Grid has reported on would include the 1.5MW system installed at a Queensland shopping centre and the 1.8MW system installed at Flinders University in South Australia.
We can confirm, however, that the Solar Carport Biddinghuizen is the coolest example we have seen, yet, due to its location, its connection to a music and arts festival, and its accommodation of sheep at all other times.
You can watch a cool video, via this page, of the solar carport opening. It is in Dutch, but you get the drift.
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
